Are You Now or Have You Ever Been
by Lady Tragic
Summary: An Enterprise crewmember is replaced by a Romulan spy… and even the spy doesn’t know it.


Title: Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been: Chapter 1

Author:Lady Tragic/phoenixofborg (LJ)

Pairing(s): McCoy/Chapel, McCoy/OFC

Rating: PG-13

Summary: An Enterprise crewmember is replaced by a Romulan spy… and even the spy doesn't know it.

Notes/Warnings: Amnesia, medibabble, and identity crises.

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It was the kind of stupid little accident that happened all the time, but that didn't make it any less annoying. Chapel turned around at the same time as McCoy did and they collided. Christine dropped the beakers of water she'd been testing, which shattered. She swore under her breath and knelt down to pick up the pieces.

"Sorry about that, Doctor. They came up negative anyway. Get me a bag for these, will you? Ah, damn!" she exclaimed as she sliced her finger on a piece of glass. Out of habit, she stuck it in her mouth.

"Let me see that," demanded McCoy.

"S'fine. Just a little cut."

"Yeah, except we have reason to believe this water's contaminated. Give it here." Christine rolled her eyes and offered her injured hand. McCoy's eyes widened.

"What? It's just a cut. Not like I've sprouted extra fingers." He dropped her hand and took several steps back.

"Christine…." McCoy trailed off, looking at her like she was some kind of monster. She looked down at the blood on her hand, and promptly passed out.

//////////////////////

She woke up flat on her back, on a hard surface. In the background, indistinct noises resolved into words.

"…any time now. We had her pretty heavily sedated," McCoy was saying. Was she in Sickbay, then? She remembered falling, falling after she looked down and saw – saw i_something/i._ Her right hand clenched involuntarily. She rolled over, and the voices abruptly went silent. Opening her eyes, she saw not the Sickbay, but the brig. Her eyes flicked down to her hand. She was in the brig because she'd cut her hand and bled green. What the hell was going on?

Dr. McCoy and the Captain were watching her through the flickering force field. Christine fumbled to say something, anything, and came up with a small, nervous-sounding, "Doctor?" She sat up and took a deep breath. "What's—what's wrong with me?"

McCoy raised an eyebrow, and his jaw was tight as he responded. "Near as I can tell? Not a thing." His voice was thick with irony. "Minus some surgical alterations… you're a perfectly healthy Romulan."

What the hell are you supposed to say to that? Christine goes for the obvious response. "That doesn't make any _sense_."

The last time she'd seen that look on the doctor's face, it had been about five seconds before he threw a punch. He spun on his heel and stormed out, leaving Kirk to stare at her with a cool, tight-reined anger and betrayal. Christine curled up very small, feeling helpless before that look. "I don't know what's going on," she said, wiping her eyes on the heel of her hand. She will _not_ cry in front of him. "I'm not a spy or a… I don't understand."

But he didn't listen, only looked at her with something very like pity, and left her alone.

//////////////////////

"It's possible," McCoy admitted grudgingly. "She didn't try to hide the cut, and keeled over in surprise when she saw the blood."

"Romulans have used brainwashed sleeper agents before," Spock observed. "But none have been discovered in over a decade, and for them to be based on a genuine person as opposed to a pure fabrication would imply considerable refinement in their techniques."

Kirk frowned. "Are we sure there ever _was_ a real Christine Chapel?" he asked, pointedly ignoring the glare Bones shot him.

"She was human at her last physical, Jim. That's the last time any blood samples or scans were taken of her. Six months ago, and she could have been switched at any time since then."

Jim sighed. "How the hell did they pull this off? Shouldn't the scanners have told us there was a Romulan life sign aboard?"

Bones shook his head. "Not when everything you can check on the outside says human. There's a box in her heart like an old-fashioned pacemaker slowing her heartbeat down to human-normal, and her hypothalamus was operated on to keep her temperature down. Not to mention the other Frankensteinian stitchwork we found in her…." He scowled. "Personally, I'm surprised she hasn't dropped dead of cardiac complications." The scowl faded a notch, and he added. "If she doesn't know she's a spy, it complicates things, doesn't it?"

"If," Kirk agreed. "If. But we don't know that for sure."

"Now that she's awake, I can have M'Benga do an EG scan on her, see what we can get."

//////////////////////

It was just her, M'Benga, and a security guard in one of the Sickbay isolation rooms. She'd been told nothing, but she didn't feel out of the loop, because some things were obvious. It was M'Benga administering the encephalographic scan (it's a lie detector, call it what it is) because he was the best acquainted with Vulcanoid physiology, but it also told her McCoy was pissed as all hell that he hadn't caught on that something was wrong (even if _she_ hadn't known) – normally, he'd be hovering. Chapel couldn't see his screen, but she knew what it looked like, the nodes taped to her head mapping her brain activity in shifting colors. She knows where the cameras are; they use them to monitor patients. It's hard not to look at them because she knows they're being watched. Kirk for sure, Spock and McCoy almost certainly.

"Please state your name, for the record." M'Benga asked, polite and reserved as ever. He had a script and everything.

"Christine Elizabeth Chapel," she replies drawing on all the calm she ever used in surgery.

"Age?" she raised an eyebrow.

"It's impolite to ask, but twenty-eight." These are baseline questions, calibrating the scanner for the ones that matter.

"N—" he almost calls her Nurse Chapel, and turns it into a cough. "Tell me something you know to be false."

Christine looks straight at the camera (back corner opposite the door), smiles and says "Captain Kirk is a cautious man."

It got a wry little smile from M'Benga and a smothered chuckle from the guard, and the scanner noted the dishonesty with an obliging beep as her brain patterns shifted. The questions tend toward specific rather than significant, trying to trip her up on details. Where did she grow up, where did she attend school, how many siblings did she have. A question about pets that told her Nyota had had a hand in writing the questions. Then, finally, the serious questions.

"Are you now, or have you ever been, in the employ of a foreign government?"

"No." There's a tense pause as the doctor and the guard wait for the machine to chime and contradict her, but it does not, to Christine's satisfaction.

"Have you ever knowingly violated Starfleet security procedures?"

"No."

"Until yesterday, did you believe yourself to be… human?"

"Absolutely."

There are other questions after that, but those are the important ones.

//////////////////////

She was moved from the brig to quarters. Not her (or rather, Chapel's) quarters, but guest quarters carefully secured and scoured of anything dangerous she might use in the event she suddenly remembered she was a Romulan spy. There was a guard outside her door. His name was Charlie, and he was terribly polite, but he still had a phaser and instructions to call for backup if she so much as made a loud noise.

Hikaru Sulu had come to visit her. It was ostensibly a social call, but Christine found it painfully obvious that the talk of their Academy days was meant to draw out errors and lapses in her memory. She indulged it anyway, laughing too loud and trying very hard to pretend that everything was fine.

"-But really, 'He's my step-brother!' That's all you could think of, Chris?"

"Christie. My twin brother is Chris," she corrected. "And I was trying to make it _not incriminating!"_

"It didn't work! It just made us look perverted!" Hikaru wiped a tear from the corner of his eye. "Why didn't we just tell the truth, again?"

"You didn't want to! You said they wouldn't believe it." Christine giggled. "Which is probably true. 'Allergic to my uniform?' Sounds like a bad pick-up line."

"And the look on your roommate's face… I didn't know a Vulcan could look that surprised." He chickled, even as Christine stopped laughing abruptly.

"My roommate was a Kriosian named Katiin," she corrected humorlessly.

"My mistake."

"No, it wasn't," Chapel stated, eyes hard. "I'm sick of these trivia games. Either treat me like a real person, or get out, Hikaru."

He took the latter option, leaving Christine sitting on the bed. She stared at her hands, feeling an overwhelming urge to check, to make sure the blood was still green, even though she knew that was something unlikely to change. She hadn't quite processed that information. Her mind was still treating this situation as temporary: a quarantine, something she would recover from. _No such luck, Christie,_ she reminded herself with dark humor. _Romulanism_ _is chronic. _Which left her with a persistent, important question – what, then, would Starfleet proscribe for long-term treatment?

//////////////////////

"If I didn't know better, I'd swear she _was_ Nurse Chapel, sir." Sulu sheepishly informed his superiors. "She's acting stressed, afraid, but nothing that doesn't seem like _her."_

"Thank you, Lieutenant. Dismissed." After the pilot had left, Kirk turned to his First Officer and asked "Were we able to narrow down the window for her abduction, Spock?"

"Nothing concrete, Captain," the Vulcan replied. "However, Nurse Chapel has gone on only eight away missions in the past six months, and on none of them were her whereabouts unaccounted for for more than several minutes at a time. The most likely opportunity for her replacement was twenty-two weeks ago, during shore leave on Starbase 17."

"Five months and change," muttered Bones. "How the hell did we not notice?"

"As you yourself observed, Doctor, the Romulans took extensive precautions to avoid her being detected. And her programming seems to have been extremely thorough," Spock answered the rhetorical coolly. McCoy glared in response.

"Which still leaves us with a Starfleet officer whose whereabouts and status is unknown. We need an answer, people -- what happened to Lieutenant Chapel?"


End file.
